User Contributed Notes 3 notes

As mentioned, if you are performing an INSERT/UPDATE or DELETE query and want to know the # of rows affected, you should use pg_affected_rows() instead of pg_num_rows().

However, you can also exploit postgres's RETURNING clause in your query to auto-select columns from the affected rows. This has the advantage of being able to tell not only how many rows a query affects, but exactly which rows those were, especially if you return a primary-key column.